Seven Signs of the Lion

PAN VIKTOR

PAN VIKTOR

Pan, or Mr. Viktor was the keeper of the mysteries and one of the first friendships Nicholas struck up in Leopolis. That’s all that Nicholas knew about him. Not quite all on second thought. He knew he was known by other names: Mr. Basilisk and Mr. Bazio. Why three names? He had even more. That’s just the way it was. No one could explain it to him. And no one could explain why he had eyes of different colors that would glow, especially on photographs. He did know that the “Mr.” part of his name, according to time-honored local Ukrainian custom, was to call people by “Mr.” (Pan) or Mrs. (Pani) or “Miss” (Panna) and their first name and in the vocative case, the case you use when you address someone. It was a sign of respect, particularly for someone older or someone to whom you had just been introduced. It had nothing to do with the Greek god of pleasure, though for the male version of the appellation it was spelled the same. The Soviets, of course, in their heyday frowned on such formalities, preferring the tovarish-comrade title.

Nicholas first met Mr. Viktor on an unusually warm and late January day, a globally warming 14 degrees centigrade during a winter heat wave, at the open-air Italian Courtyard Café on Rynok Square, the Medieval central market square of the city with its 44 houses that were planned in the 14th century when Lviv was under Polish rule. Each house was four-stories high and of a different color, ranging from faded yellows and light-to-dark greens and black. On all four sides the houses surrounded the faded yellow Ratusha, the City Hall building in the center of the square with its tall, angular clock and bell tower.

Mr. Viktor was sitting at a table next to a polished tall white statue of an anatomically correct Adonis, that is, with no fig leaf. Nicholas couldn’t help but notice a statue of blind justice in the corner of the courtyard. Mr. Viktor’s dark eyes immediately homed in on Nicholas’s as if old friends were recognizing each other after a long absence, but, of course, they had never met before. Mr. Viktor motioned for him to sit down next to him, and Nicholas obliged.

Mr. Viktor was a tall man, but not too tall, with a baldpate on the top of his head with hair on the sides and back, and with a short-cropped, neatly trimmed beard. It was odd that he had half a mustache. That is to say, it was trimmed neatly from the top, halfway down his lip. So it met with his beard and formed a near-perfect oval. There were slight tinges of gray in his beard. He looked in his mid-forties, but oddly, sometimes caught in a millisecond of a blink, he would look much younger or much older – like a man seemingly of multiple ages flashing back and forth between those ages, nearly unnoticeable to the naked eye like the flickering of a computer screen.

Nicholas had seen earlier pictures of Mr. Viktor with a ponytail and getting body-painted for a rock performance in his student days. This Mr. Viktor was more staid. “Older and wiser,” Mr. Viktor would say to him later.

“There are forces here at play that you just don’t understand,” Mr. Viktor told him at one point of their initial conversation. “I can tell you something about it, but not everything. You’ll have to learn for yourself. And you’ll learn better on your own path, at your own pace, and in your own time.”

“Do you know anything about signs of the lion?” Nicholas asked him.

“I don’t know…,” Mr. Viktor answered hesitatingly. “I don’t really know much about them. I just know they exist and they’re extremely important. I can tell you, though, that they’re somehow connected with you.”

Mr. Viktor’s right eye seemed to have an even brighter glow as he said what he said. It showed up in the photographs even after Nicholas had erased the red eye in his Photoshop program.